Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today the Senate has passed important bipartisan legislation to reduce the chilling effect that foreign libel lawsuits are having on Americans' first amendment rights. I am the son of printers and I consider this a matter of great importance. My parents told me from the time I was a child: Believe in and uphold the first amendment. It is the basis of our democracy. It guarantees us the right to practice any religion we want or none if we want. And it protects the right of free speech. Those protections guarantee diversity. If you have a constitution that guarantees diversity, you guarantee a democracy. That is what this does. I wish to thank Senator Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for working with me on this bill. Let me speak a little bit about what the bill does. The Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act or, as we call it, the SPEECH Act, will ensure that American courts will not enforce foreign libel judgments from countries where free speech protections are lower than what our Constitution affords against American journalists, authors, and publishers. Too frequently, foreign plaintiffs bring libel suits against American writers and publishers in countries where the plaintiff or the publication lacks any significant connection to the foreign forum. The lawsuit is brought there because of that foreign country's weaker plaintiff-friendly libel laws.…”